Collection
Phenomenology and Artificial Intelligence: Bridges and New Paths
The new developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence raise many different philosophical questions that can profoundly change our thinking about various mental concepts, such as what it means to be a conscious subject, how perception works, how humans interact with their environment via their bodies, and so on (cf. Andler, 2006; Froese & Ziemke, 2009). Oddly enough, these new developments – from machine learning tools to deep learning algorithms and artificial neural networks – have not been the primary focus of philosophical deliberation (with some exceptions, such as Buccella & Springle, 2022). As a philosophical approach that focuses on the study of the universal structures of subjective experiences and the way people perceive and interpret the world around them, phenomenology can provide valuable insights when applied to AI in general (cf. Mensch, 1991; Preston, 1993; Beavers, 2002). Relevant issues are related to topics such as how the Internet can be considered a new kind of cognitive ecology (cf. Smart, Heersmink & Clowes, 2017), the impact that virtual reality and the metaverse can have on the 4E’s approach to the mind (cf. Smart, 2022), how the research in Robotics can be improved by making use of the 4E Cognition framework (cf. Hoffmann & Pfeifer, 2018), or the philosophical debates raised by the existence of large language models such as ChatGPT by OpenAI (e.g. is there a relationship between linguistic behavior/performance and subjectivity?) (cf. Floridi, 2023). The Special Issue aims to consider how the combination of phenomenology and AI can provide new ways of understanding subjective experience in its broadest sense on the one hand, and how AI practice and development can be improved and understood via an inspired phenomenological approach broadly considered.
Editors
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Steven Gouveia
Steven Gouveia (stevensequeira92@gmail.com) holds a PhD in (Neuro)Philosophy of the Mind from the University of Minho. He was a visiting researcher at the Minds, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Unit of the Royal Institute of Mental Health at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Currently leads a six-year project on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, being a researcher at the Mind, Language and Action Group, Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto. Has published 13 academic books (with Routledge, Palgrave or Bloomsbury), recently being “Thinking the New World: Conversations on AI” (2023). More info: stevensgouveia.weebly.com
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Carlos Morujão
Carlos Morujão (carlosmorujao@ucp.pt) is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal. He has taught the subjects of History of Contemporary Philosophy, History of Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Knowledge, and Phenomenology. His main research interests are currently centered on the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. He is a member of the Iberian Network of Fichtean Studies and a founding member of the Portuguese Association of Phenomenological Philosophy, whose Board of Directors he was a member of between 2007 and 2012.
